Archives for November 2011

Are you a robot? A spammer? A sock puppet? A trusted author and content developer? A trusted agent in the eyes of Google? (More on trusted agents below.)

When you interact on a social network, or write a review online or update information to an internet mapping service, how much does the service you are using trust the content that you add, or the changes that you might make?

These aren’t rhetorical questions, but rather ones at the heart of approaches from services like Google Web search and Google Maps, which are focusing more and more upon social signals and social collaboration to provide the information that they do to the public.

If you’ve seen a +1 button within Google’s search results or on a site, and you’ve clicked upon it, or shared a page or post or site in Google Plus with others, you’ve engaged in endorsing the work of the author who created that site. How much weight does Google give that endorsement?

If you find an error on a Google Place page, such as an incorrect phone number or bad street address, and you take the time to try to correct that, what process might Google go through to decide if you’re telling the truth?

A number of years back, I remember being humbled by a homework assignment crayon drawing by a friend’s son which listed what he was thankful for, and included his parents, his sister, and shoes that Thanksgiving. We take so much for granted that we should be thankful that we have. A few friends and I had gathered over my friend’s house, and we were all knocked somewhat silent by the picture when he proudly showed it off to his father. Thank you to everyone who stops by here to read, to learn, to share, and to add to the discussion. Thank you too, for the chance to share the things I find and the things that I learn from you all.

When Google responds to a searcher’s query, it presents a list of pages and other kinds of documents such as images or news or videos. The patent’s filing date is from before Google’s universal search but probably does a good job of describing something Google might do with web page based search results.

A Google patent granted last week describes how the search engine might enable people to experiment with changing the weight and value of different ranking signals for web pages to gauge how those changes might influence the quality of search results for specific queries. The patent lists Misha Zatsman, Paul G. Haahr, Matthew D. Cutts, and Yonghui Wu amongst its inventors, and doesn’t provide much in the way of context as to how this evaluation system might be used. As it’s written, it seems like something the search engine could potentially make available to the public at large, but I’m not sure if they would do that.

In the blog post Google Raters – Who Are They?, Potpiegirl writes about the manual reviewers used by Google to evaluate the relevance and quality of search results by parsing through a forum where people have been discussing their experiences as reviewers for Google search results and collecting information about how the review program works. It contains some interesting information about the processes used by people who have been working to provide human evaluations for Google’s results, including a discussion of two different types of reviews that they participate in. One of those involves being given a particular keyword and a URL, and deciding how relevant that page is for that keyword. The other involves being given two different sets of search results for the same query, and deciding which set of results provides the best results for the query term.

I included a number of links and references within the presentation that we didn’t visit or spend time on, for anyone who might want to visit those for more details. The basic premise behind my presentation was that Social Media has changed the expectations of searchers and the search engines have had no recourse but to change in response, and SEO likewise is evolving to meet those expectations.

Imagine being able to highlight any text on a web page and search the Web based upon that text? Or an easier way to embed videos or other content in windows that will appear and open up without launching a new browser window.

Now imagine that your Google Plus Circles could engage in friend relationship management, being better at self organizing by grouping people whom you add to your Google Plus Account by whether they are co-workers, or if they live nearby, or the kind of company they work for, or the school that they went to or many other ways that might make circle management smarter and a little more fun. Now imagine that the technology behind that involves the use of intelligent social media agents that keep an eye on the social activity of your contacts.

Google revealed last Thursday that they acquired a couple of companies, seemingly both for the expertise and knowledge of the people employed by those companies and the technology that they have developed. I found the patent filings that have been assigned to both companies to try to get a deeper glimpse at some of the technologies that both companies have developed.

One of the companies that Google acquired is Apture, a business started by Tristan Harris and Can Sar, a couple of Stanford students in 2007. The Apture Website notes that the Apture team will be joining Google’s Chrome Team. That makes sense since Apture specializes in making browser experiences richer by proving text boxes that pop-out when you click upon links on a page. Apture was supplying these types of features for a number of partner sites as well as a plugin that would work with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

Once upon a time, when you searched the Web at Google, the results displayed were limited to a list of 10 pages with page title, snippet of text from meta description or page content, and URL to that page. We’ve been seeing the search engines diversifying what they might display for certain pages, with special formats for things like forum posts, Q&A listings, pages that include events, and sometimes sitelinks or quicklinks to other pages as well.

The URL shown for some pages might have hinted at the structure of sites and locations of pages within a site hierarchy, if they showed directories and subdirectories within paths to pages. Some websites include breadcrumb navigation on their pages to show you more explicitly where you might be at within a site, and provide an easy way to visit higher categories. Google has started showing those breadcrumb listings for some pages, to make those listings more useful for searchers, and to make it more clear where those pages are within the hierarchy of a site.